I know I gave his eulogy a few days ago, but I want to spend a bit more time remembering Saber-Cat here.

When I first joined Technefarious, Saber-Cat spent six weeks trying to kill me.

At this point, I’ve been associated with our criminal enterprise long enough that people think of me more as The Killing Man: That Guy From Technefarious than anything else. Back then, I still best known for killing the Titanium Android. Not constrained by the limitations of merely biological body, the Titanium Android relentlessly patrolled the Earth, saving lives of every sort. He was so dedicated to preserving life that he declined to kill those villains he fought that the rest of the world would dispose of in a flat second.

Saber-Cat had fought the Titanium Android three times over the years. Twice, he fought the Android to a standstill and then escaped. The third time ended with a short stint in prison for Saber, which Technefarious extracted him from.

Despite his association with us, Saber-Cat was not so much of a criminal as an immortal furry man with a Sabertooth tiger’s head whose ancient sense of morality is out of step with the modern world. The illegality of jaywalking made no sense to him, and the concept of sitting through a red light when no one was else was coming struck him as insane. His willingness to fight and disdain for the finer points of modern bureaucracy made Technefarious a good fit for him, but he was certainly capable of appreciating the good that Titanium Android did for the world.

As such, he was less than appreciative of the invitation Dr. Occultomancer made to the superhero’s killer to join Technefarious’s ranks. Saber wasn’t able to talk Occult into rescinding his offer, so the big cat-man decided to address his discomfort with the situation by killing me. He was perfectly aboveboard with intentions, challenging me to a duel to the death. I declined, since I didn’t feel any particular need to kill him. He persisted, so I negotiated a different set of terms. We would fight. If he surrendered, I could stay. If I surrendered, I would have to leave. If one of us happened to die during the fight, so be it.

We met that evening in one of the Technefarious’s gyms, before an audience made up mostly of Saber’s friends on the staff. Dr. Occultomancer tried to talk us out of it, but neither Saber-Cat nor I are exactly slavish in obeying orders. After Occult retired to his seat in annoyance, Saber-Cat and I faced off. Saber was armed with that magic saber he loved so much, while I brought in a sword so I had a blade to match against his. It was just a regular sword and perfectly incapable of killing the furry idiot, which I confirmed every night for six weeks by maiming him to the point where he couldn’t actually continue the fight. He got stabbed through the heart, had his eyes ripped out, and limbs severed. My favorite evening was the one where I decapitated him and he spent fifteen minutes cursing at me until his tongue got too dry to speak clearly anymore. He still refused to surrender though. He was immortal and saw no reason the temporary inconvenience of a lack of body parts to declare the fight over.

I’m underselling Saber-Cat’s fighting skills with that last paragraph. He had millennia of combat experience under his belt and none of our fights lasted less than an hour. I just happen to be really, really dangerous myself. After it was clear that a single round wasn’t going to resolve the issue, Dr. Occultomancer declared that we could only continue our fight after the workday. For six weeks, we were the star event of Technefarious’s evenings. Saber couldn’t beat me, and I refused to walk away.

The last night, I waited patiently across our battlefield from Saber-Cat for sixty minutes. He stood the entire time with his resting on the hilt of his saber, its tip dug into the ground, watching me through slitted eyelids. At the end of that hour, he placed his blade on the ground, then walked over and knelt before me. That was the last time we crossed swords.

Well, with actual swords anyway. He never hesitated to tell me off when he thought I was wrong, even after I took over Technefarious.

Our occult department tells me they think there was some sort of magical interference with our attempt to rescue him after the failure of Operation Carved Branch. When possible, the Establishment likes to teleport its superpowered prisoners when it needs to move them from one place to another. There have been so many escapes and rescues during transit when their prisoners are moved the regular way that the expense of teleportation is worth it when the superpowers involved don’t make it too risky. The interruption of the power containment they have to use on Frigid and Bleach if they were teleported means they will have to be moved over land. Saber-Cat, with his purely physical powers, was a perfect candidate for teleporting. Technefarious has been sitting on a scheme to intercept an Establishment teleportation signal for some time now, and this seemed like a reasonable time to tip our hand on that. The worst that our attempt should have resulted in was causing enough interference to bounce him back to his original teleportation pad. Instead, our attempt to steal the signal scattered him across half the world.

When our science department reported that, I knew he was dead this time, just like I knew my sword couldn’t kill him back when I fought him. Because of his powers, we could never hook him into our soul catchers, but I had our occult department try to retrieve him anyways. They could only confirm that his soul had indeed passed to the other side.

We have some work ahead of us this week. Plotting three prison breaks from maximum security should be enough to keep all of Technefarious out of trouble. Well, relatively out of trouble. I’m just saying we’ll be too busy to secure our rule over the world.

We’re following up Operation Carved Branch with Operation Wrong Side of the Bars, since the former turned into such of fiasco. For those of you that weren’t in on the briefing for Carved Branch, it involved entering the home base of the Danger People and stealing White Staff’s white staff. Its use for years as a focus for combat magic made it the perfect channel for Project Cracked Foundation.

Despite their name, the Danger People are not most dangerous superheroes on the planet. For what should have been a simple home invasion, a small group consisting of Frigid, Bleach, Saber-Cat, and the Elite Triad’s Gamma body could handle any resistance the heroes could put up. In fact, it wouldn’t even be that hard for White Staff to replace the staff, so we weren’t even expecting too much follow-up harassment if we succeeded.

Unfortunately, our crew walked into the middle of someone else’s attack on the Danger People. The initial insertion into the base went smoothly enough, aside from an elevated amount of tension among the biological members of the team. Elite has been beating themselves up for not noticing the discrepancy from such an experienced group, but I hardly call an extra bit of nervousness at the beginning of a mission a big tipoff.

Elite reported that inside the building it was unusually quiet. Passive scans picked up background signs of life, but no recreational noise, i.e. music, television, banging around the kitchen, having sex. By the time they had moved deep enough into the facility to wonder about the quiet, the Shudders had already cut off our people’s retreat.

Shudders are inky shadow creatures of extra-dimensional evil in the service of the Fear Carrier, a longtime enemy of the Danger People. The Fear Carrier had already attacked their base and was still in the process of rounding up all the heroes when we went in. The communications jamming the Carrier radiated went unnoticed by the Technefarious crew who were observing radio silence for the initial part of the operation. The Shudders had no orders to keep people out, so they waited until our people were far enough and then attacked them. They captured Saber-Cat in their initial attack, but Bleach’s power draining attacks stymied their attempts to bring down the other three. Unfortunately, the only line of retreat was further into the building.

Frigid gave orders that escape was the new objective of the mission, which when is when they discovered the jamming. They also discovered Stewpot of the Danger People hiding from the Shudders. They immediately arranged a temporary truce and discovered that Stewpot had managed to get a distress call out to the Establishment before the Fear Carrier cut the base off. That was certainly mixed news for our crew, but Frigid decided that prison time was preferable to hoping an understanding could be reached with the Carrier. Elite’s records reveal the flesh and blood people were showing extreme emotional disturbance at this point, probably due to the proximity of the Carrier, but I applaud Frigid arriving at a rational decision under those circumstances.

The exact record of events becomes confused at the point. Elite was captured and damaged by the Shudders. They awoke to find Frigid pleading Technefarious’s case in front of Fear Carrier itself. Saber-Cat chimed his support, much to the disgust of the members of the Danger People being held prisoner around the room. Elite noted at this point that neither Stewpot nor Bleach seemed to be part of the collection. Frigid’s offers fell upon deaf ears as the Carrier accused them of being part of the Establishment forces now besieging the base.

The Fear Carrier was preparing to kill Frigid and throw her body outside as a warning when three Shudders came into the room, dragging Stewpot behind them. Carrier was delighted to complete its collection the Danger People and took a minute to gloat over its success.

Now I know we’ve discussed this. When do we gloat? After our opponent is dead, and we’re safely back home.

While it gloated, the Carrier failed to notice two of the Shudders split off from Stewpot and begin undoing the bonds holding the Danger People. Shadow Sally and Night Ink from the Establishment’s forces had snuck through the Shudder’s line of defense to try and find the Danger People. They found Stewpot and Bleach, the latter not more than a shadow himself after draining over two dozen Shudders down to the dregs of their power. Together, they hatched a plan to get close to Fear Carrier and his prisoners by pretending to be Shudders bringing Stewpot to him. When Carrier finally noticed its prisoners being freed, Stewpot and Bleach struck, knocking the monster back on its heels. From there, the combined forces of Technefarious, the Danger People, and the Establishment disrupted the Fear Carrier’s hold on the base and drove him and his minions back to the black dimension they call home.

With the Carrier gone, our crew was left outnumbered in the room and outnumbered even more by fresh enemies outside the building, none of whom were happy to see them. The Elite Triad quietly informed that Frigid that the Establishment’s own countermeasures outside the facility were still blocking teleportation, but not the Technefarious communication lines. Frigid ordered the Triad to escape and then offered her surrender on the behalf of the rest of the group. The Elite were not happy to go, but dutifully set its body to melt into slag and downloaded themselves back to the base.

I took the Elite Triad’s report and denied its request to immediately go to the rescue. There was an extraction team ready to go, but they weren’t heavy enough to go toe to toe with an Establishment strike force that was ready for a fight. A jailbreak or three would be much easier.

Speaking of which, I’m going to go back to planning those now.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Having completed my goal of killing a superhero in cold blood last week, I spent the last week in the office killing projects. When a villainous organization has been around for as long as Technefarious, it’s inevitable that some junk will accumulate.

Unhappy I chopped your pet program? Well, let’s see what I ended.

Project Rotten Core involved sticking a planet-cracker bomb at the center of the Earth. I’m sorry, but you break it, you bought doesn’t work well as a long term strategy for our rule. If we ever do break it, we’ll have to fix the damn thing. Not that we can’t, it’s just that it’s a hell of a lot more work than I want to do.

I also ended Project Weebly Wobbly, which included a step where we turned the Moon into cheese. If we have to transmute an entire planetoid, the plan might just have too many moving parts. Consider all the rigamarole I went through to kill Pinnacle and then realized that if I think the plan is too complicated, it’s probably too complicated.

One more: Project New Light would introduce a false messiah to the Earth. That’s great, until you realize that Technefarious wouldn’t publically be in charge. If our messiah decides he doesn’t like being our puppet, he’d be in a great position to turn on us.

Did I say “our puppet?” I meant “my puppet.” Did I say “turn on us?” I meant “turn on me.” I’m the boss until I’m not, kids.

If you don’t see some of our faithful lieutenants in your departments this week, it’s because they’re breaking down a plot for Operation Carved Branch, which will kickoff Project Cracked Foundation. It’s an all specialists operation, so aside from having an extraction team on standby, it shouldn’t disrupt the daily routines of too many of you.

In said news, Henchman 00A-1T (Dr. Codger), who worked with Dr. Crankpot back in the day, passed away yesterday afternoon. I’m going through his file to put together a speech for his memorial tomorrow, and I’m amazed he lasted this long. He was gray and wrinkled when he joined Technefarious all those decades ago. I’ll miss him. He made a mean gin and tonic.

Friday is the finals for the skee ball competition. The stuffed animal filling up hanger B is the trophy for the winner. I had it custom made. I have no idea how you’re going to get it out of there since it’s too big to get through the doors. Just remember, if you win it, you’re responsible for getting it out of there.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

The Fogurols invaded lasted week. They are aliens bent on conquering the Earth, requiring the superheroes and supervillains to band together drive them off, blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately, there are always a few casualties from this sort of thing. This time, the vigilante Pinnacle numbered among our dead.

“But wait,” you say, “wasn’t killing Pinnacle the focus of Project King of the Mountain? Are you trying to tell me they succeeded where our illustrious leader failed?”

First of all, “illustrious?” Suck up.

Second of all, no, I just want the rest of the world to think Pinnacle died during the latest world crisis, which was the plan all along. Considering his connections to the Board of Directors for the Establishment, it was safer for Technefarious if their attention wasn’t focused on wiping me out. I added enough trouble for us by killing Record Holder during my little safari.

So, having pissed off Pinnacle to the point where he would follow me into a trap to get at me, I then had to wait for a worldwide event to distract from our little fight. Those little dustups happen every couple of months on our Earth, so I didn’t expect to be holed up in my cave for too long.

Did I mention the trap was in a cave? Originally enchanted to hold the Thunder Beast’s Shadow long before humans tamed fire, Technefarious annexed the underground prison after the Shadow escaped in the 1960’s. We’ve augmented it over the years with psionic baffles and entropy stabilizers, creating a battleground that nullifies 99% of superpowers. It doesn’t work on me. My physical powers are expressed in my muscles and bones, and fields that cut off external power sources don’t affect those. The insights I get on how to kill anything are trickier to trace, but I’ve never found anything that can block them either.

Interestingly enough, all the power drainers we had at work were not perfectly suited to stripping Pinnacle of his powers either. Even within the cave, my special insights suggested scenarios that would require widely divergent responses on my part to finally bring him down. Frustratingly, my powers were vague on exactly what acts he could perform that wouldn’t be stopped by our fields. Superpowers are just a giant game of rock, paper, scissors sometimes.

Still, the dampening hampered him. That slick power armor he uses to enhance his strength and speed had to come off. As for his famed gadgets and utilities, the fields stripped away their battery power, turning half of them into so much junk. Sure, he still had his smoke bombs, submission sprays, and low ignition chemicals available, but it as a fair fight. After all, I had a knife.

Our battle lasted two hours and six minutes. I suffered seven broken bones, lost three teeth, and had my left ring finger cut off second knuckle. The knife I started with changed hands five times. I was glad when the fight finally finished, because by the end I really, really needed to pee.

After I patched myself up, I dressed Pinnacle in his armor, damaged it to match the injuries he had received during our fight, and then dumped his body in one of the battle sites with the Fogurols. The Establishment will find him there and assume he fell defending the planet. They’ll figure out the truth eventually, I’m sure, but by then, something else will have come along to distract most of the world’s superheroes from what I’d done.

Let’s hope that distraction is our successful enforcement of our rule over the world.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.